It's a pretty touchy subject - mainly cause it's boils down to preference. I wasn't a fan of mobile either till I found work and could only play on my phone. Managed to find good games like Dragon Encounter and Tap Titans to keep me company in the office. It's probably cause you haven't digged down long enough to find the really good ones. (or it's just really not your cup of tea)
Back in 2009, the selling games on the iOS AppStore was actually a viable alternative. There were few people back then who could actually do iOS development. Nowadays, if somebody wants iOS work done, they no longer have to pay a premium for such services. Unfortunately, the gold rush ended when more developers mad-grabbed for the piece of the iOS gaming pie, and got worse when the larger companies who stayed off thinking iOS gaming would be a fad decided to get in. With their manpower and resources, they're now cleaning up shop and taking in 90%+ of the revenues on the App Store. I got into iOS gaming back in 2011. Later then you, but I still remember that "long gone time". It was an interesting period. On a related tech note, I still remember life before the internet iOS premium iOS games aren't just competing with freeware... they're also competing with so many other forms of entertainment. Some of them free. Believe or not, there generally isn't a culture of paying for stuff on iOS. No, it isn't just an Android thing. It may be worse there, but it most certainly exists on iOS, especially how saturated things are. Ohhh HELL NO! You are aware Apple gets a 30% cut of all IAP, not just app purchases? 30% of how many billions is a staggering amount to walk away from. A business does NOT kill its golden goose. You may feel like freemium is the devil, worse than Hitler, should have more restrictions than smoking, but Apple has no motivation to change.
No fan of FTP games but I have played a few decent ones. What i feel mobile really needed was a couple big companies like Sony and Nintendo to start making legitimate games (not free to play ones) and then it would help get the more serious gamers attention. Nintendo is never going to do that. Well never is too strong not in the near future anyways. Sony is by the way getting in more soon w mobile and that's actually a good thing as I think they will take it more seriously than Nintendo will. By the way the Nintendo games on mobile will not have some console type feel (that's false hope bs) they will have a cheap FTP feel like all FTP games have. I love mobile gaming and I game three ways PC console and mobile and I will be honest for portability and overall reasons I like mobile best of all 3! The games are one thing holding it back. And here's the deal that will come in time. Mobile gaming is still an infant learning to crawl and also I believe VR will help push mobile gaming further but it's too early I'm looking ahead Good future in gaming no matter how you game but in the end mobile will be no1 eventually. To say it's sucks is insane though. Your opinion though and I respect that aspect of it but majority of gamers seem to like it okay.
TL;DR - Because the supply of things to grab our collective attentions far outstrips demand. It's hard to find those needles in the haystack, when the haystack is the size of a small city. That said, your entire premise is a loaded question that presupposes that mobile games suck. They suck for you, and from your rant, it's easy to see why. You like games that have at best a niche audience, and would likely sink without a trace in the AppStore. This is not the platform for you. Make peace with that...it's not going to bend to your will. The market has spoken. There are endless articles on how the game industry has found itself in crisis, many published on this website. I myself was a game developer for 23 years and watched from the inside. Game development is not a charity, nor is it cheap. Like any other entertainment product, developers either follow the money or make small, personal projects. And that money is not at all aligned with your interests, I'm afraid. There are few mobile gamers willing to pay for titles, especially hardcore genres. Not enough to sustain an industry at any rate. Players are not being "lured by free games," they literally will not spend money for a game up front. And let's be honest, the race to the bottom is largely our fault as developers. During the AppStore gold rush, developers kept undercutting themselves until consumer expectations were totally at odds with turning a profit- As players we want free, unlimited game updates but we have trouble even spending 99 cents for it. It's simple math, something had to give. It's exactly the same reason why "trialware" became a thing on PC 10 years ago. Eventually it too saw declining return on investment as it seems far too many people were more than willing to play a demo version endlessly, rather than pay for the complete experience.
The answer to your question is because smartphones has it's limitations. A good decent game in PC and consoles has better GPU processors unlike in smartphones. Smartphones also has limited memory to run a decent games so developers try to make games in smartphones that can be handle by any hardware of the smartphones.
There's no need to have a great hardware to be able to play cool games like the first Aralon, device 6, year walk and many others. Nice games don't need to push hardware to the limit.
In some ways I agree with you, particularly WRT F2P games, but I wouldn't necessarily discount ports. As someone who never owned the PS1, I've been enjoying the Final Fantasy games. Still working my way through FFVII (not bad honestly if you have a controller). As someone who played the GTA games in college, but never actually finished them because I mostly just used cheat codes to goof around in them, I have liked the GTA ports. Actually, looking at the "games" page on my home screen, I see... 18 games (plus a folder). Of those 18 games, only Ascension isn't a port, a side-loaded console emulator, or a game released at the same time as a PC version. Looking at that folder, there are 16 games and there are more mobile only games there, like Flappy Bird, Shooty Skies, some board games, Threes, and Organ Trail. I think 5 of the 16 are ports (6 if you count King of Dragon Pass). I should point out at this point that when it comes to iOS, I rarely game on my iPhone. If I am going to game, it's on my iPad. Could I many of those ports on my Mac, sure I could. But I prefer to play on my iPad. Anyways, I don't think mobile games "still" suck. They have gotten generally worse. There are fewer and fewer games that make me excited. I think of the games definitely upcoming, I'm only excited about Titan Quest (why there aren't more Diablo-like games on iOS, I'll never understand). Maybe Prison Architect too, but who knows when Introversion will get around to actually releasing it. But the industry is definitely leaning more toward F2P, a game type I now refuse to even download. Developers I love are more wary of the market, like Slitherine. But for a few years, it seemed like at least once a month there would be a good game coming out that I really wanted to try. I wouldn't say that mobile gaming sucked then. Does it "suck" now? Well, I'm still having a lot of fun gaming on my iPad, even if I haven't gotten a new game in a few months. But my excitement is definitely tempered when it comes to the industry as a whole.
I don't think this year is treating us too badly so far. Here's a list of some 2016 iOS games: Final Fantasy IX; Warbits; Crashlands; Lost Socks; Ys Chronicles II; Looty Dungeon; Tennis Champs Returns; PKTBALL; King Rabbit; 9th Dawn II; Dungelot Shattered Lands; Super Phantom Cat; Planar Conquest; Hammer Bomb; Adventures of Mana. This is a great mix of genres, ports and original games, long-players and casual, FTP and premium, most of which would have been pushing for the GOTY list in, say, 2013. Out of stuff coming up, I am excited about the ports Titan Quest and Romancing Saga 2, and the originals Morphite from Crescent Moon and that Suzie Cube 3D platformer. So it's not that bad, is it?
People seem to see only what they want to. Even if we have 100000000000000 horrible games (and we do) we still have a lot of really good ones still coming up. In fact, I probably have more games than I can play on my lifetime. Lol It would be great, sure, if we have even more original engrossing experiences, but we are not in a bad position. Not by far.
That is one saving grace I think. I have such a backlog of games from past years that a lull in current releases hasn't been as bad as it could be for me. The last game I bought was Final Fantasy IX and I haven't touched it yet because I am still working through FFVII.
This is key. More great games than ever are being released on mobile, and most of them cost very little or nothing to play. Unfortunately, people either choose to focus on all the garbage that gets released on mobile and/or just have weirdly unrealistic expectations instead... While often having a backlog of hundreds of awesome games they haven't even launched yet.
Because they're expensive to make? They're also very time consuming to make due to all the triggers you need to implement and check. More than one blog post or user comment has been from developers who say they LOVE making RPGs, but they take years of development to get in. (one guy even quit that to design board games instead). On Palm OS from the last decade or so (1997 to 2010), many users showed disdain how many of the games were card and casino games. Well, it's not secret... RPGs are hard to make. When Blizzard released World Of Warcraft, many other game studios thought about making their own MMORPG. They deemed it would be too expensive to make, maintain, while not generating enough revenue. In you're trying to make $$ in a market where users don't really pay for stuff, then it just ain't worth it. These days, more devs than not struggle to make enough to pay Apple's annual iOS dev fee ($99/year) Otherwise, I never really kept up on iOS games, but I knew there was Dungeon Hunters 1 through 3. 3 was f2p. Speaking of which... What you said there is probably the reason why they don't want to make them. In order to have a sustainable business model, they either need to charge premium pricing ($20!? You may be able to pay for it, but not enough of others will), or do f2p. You won't do this, so they probably see there's no product that's worth making.
Nowadays, I only play my old psp, gba, and nds games.. mobile gaming doesn't fit my gaming taste taste anymore except for crashland and implosion which i still play occasionally... each to their own opinion though
Because they don't and all you young ones are spoiled rotten? Jokes aside, if someone had told me when I played Pong or Pacman in the Arcades as a kid that 35 years later I can carry games with gorgeous graphics around in my hand on a thingie no bigger than a 20-page comic I would have told them they are crazy. Sure, PC graphics are a lot better. But what do you expect when a high-end gaming machine has graphics cards that drain >2 kiloWatt (latest dual nVidia) ? Power consumption and space needed aside, you can never get rid of that much heat on a handheld device. Are mobile graphics good enough? Definitely yes. And like others wrote, making good games - e.g. good RPGs - is expensive and takes a lot of time. Not to mention that a lot of developers don't make enough money from these games to keep the lights on. Josh (Crescent Moon) flat-out stated here on the forums that the main reason for the next Ravensword having lower-end graphics is cost: they simply don't get enough revenue anymore to afford creating graphics on the level of, say, XCOM or Nimian Legends. Oh, and when you get a game that pulls out all the stops people start whining why it doesn't run on their prehistoric hardware (iPhone 4 with iOS 7? Yeah sure...) . And we still get great stuff like the Spiderweb games (perfectly demonstrating that eyecandy isn't everything), things from the Trese brothers and whathaveyou. Even if you don't jump on the latest ClashofHearthCrossyBird fad, there's a lot of amazing games out there, and for all tastes. I am very picky with what I play and like, and my backlog is still growing a lot faster than I can keep up with it. As for F2P: It's where the money is (for some/most), and that's all I'm going to say on a subject beaten to death already.
Yes but FF7, 8 and 9 all suck on iPad because the controls are crap... I tried playing Kotor this morning and the controls sucked on that too.
That'a matter of personal taste. I fond them quite satisfying. In fact, I find those games perfectly suited for touchscreen.
Agreed. I'm really enjoying FF IX, which is a great touchscreen port. Scaramoosh, do you prefer using a gamepad to cycle through menus? I find that surprising.
Not enjoying FF8? Presumably you're using that Japanese portal app, which tries to map controllers onto the screen. I've heard that is pretty awful. If Square Enix ever get around to porting the game for iOS, I'm sure it will be better, hopefully more IX than VII.
